


Exile

by SilentAuror



Series: Intermezzo stories (TST-TLD) [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Gen, M/M, POV: Sherlock, spoilers for series 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-05
Updated: 2017-01-05
Packaged: 2018-09-14 22:01:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9205085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilentAuror/pseuds/SilentAuror
Summary: A companion piece toThese Four Walls. After Mary's death, Sherlock contemplates the ways in which he failed John.





	

**Exile**

 

A trail of ash slowly devours the body of the cigarette, leaving nothing but grey filth to drop away into the saucer on the coffee table so that when he next brings the filter to his mouth, Sherlock finds it nearly burnt out. 

It doesn’t matter. 

Nothing matters. 

(Paradox: nothing is nothing. Nothing cannot be matter because if it were matter, then it could not, by definition, be nothing. E=mc2: everything is either something or nothing. Something would be matter. Nothing cannot be matter. ‘Nothing matters’ is therefore a paradoxical statement – )

 _Shut up, shut up, shut up!_ Being clever, overanalysing everything and everyone, over-thinking, showing off: that’s how this happened. It’s his own fault. He couldn’t just learn to shut up. Stop talking. Keep his thoughts to himself. 

The ash is steadily burning its way through the mouth of the filter now, the heat of it stinging his finger tips. Sherlock drops it into the saucer (did Mrs Hudson put that there? It doesn’t matter) and reaches into the left pocket of his dressing gown to bring out a fresh cigarette, his lighter in the right pocket. Snick of the wheel turning, tiny flame, inhalation, and there it is, the rush of nicotine temporarily flooding his brain in a wash of dizzy stimulation. It’s almost vertigo, but perhaps that’s also because he hasn’t eaten in longer than he can be bothered to remember. 

It doesn’t matter. 

Nothing matters. 

(Stop.)

What more can a person give when a whole life has already been given? What more can he be expected to do? It’s more than just ‘life’, more than just the oxygen circling through his heart and veins and arteries and capillaries, gas exchange permeating through the walls of his cells. More than just his living, breathing flesh and blood. He gave all of it, and yet it still isn’t enough. Still wasn’t anywhere near enough to prevent this exile. 

He thought he’d escaped exile. 

The plane turned around, a surge of hope expanding so hugely in his chest that it was painful. He would see John again. It wasn’t the end, after all. He wasn’t being sent away to die. One minute he was; the next: reprieve. He would allowed to see John again. The petty little complications didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but that: he would see John again. Or rather, John&Mary, but he could swallow that, having Mary as well as John. 

It’s always been a poor second, having John diluted with Mary, but Sherlock’s experienced not having John at all and doesn’t care for it. Oh, he can do it: solve crimes, unravel the mysteries, jump through the hoops. He still enjoys the thrill of it. But it’s infinitely better with two, and not just any two: with John. His conductor of light, touchstone, earth grounding, reality-bearing John. He never needed a partner: he needed John. Hadn’t known he needed John until the day they met, and all of a sudden Sherlock had been confronted by the missing element in his life in the shape of a limping, war-scarred soldier-doctor-hero with Afghani sand still clinging to his skin. _Oh, there you are. I didn’t know I needed you until I saw you._

Mycroft always said it was a liability, which Sherlock already knew. Didn’t need the reminder, thank you very much. He knew. The full impact of it hadn’t hit until he saw John emerge from the dressing room at the pool wearing the bomb vest, though: how much having a John in his life would impact them both. Being his friend had endangered John, though he’d come into said danger willingly enough. Happily, even: John was relieved to have been spared the trudging boredom of his civilian life. Sherlock had spared him that. But it put them both into a new sort of danger. 

And then he’d had to die for John. Not literally, he’d devoutly hoped at the time, in freefall from the rooftop of Bart’s Hospital. But he’d had to make John believe it. And keep believing it, for two long years. And when it was all over, he’d come back, but it was never the same, because Mary was there. 

_Mary._

Sherlock sees her face as he last saw it on the video. _Go to hell, Sherlock_. The deepening of the lines framing her mouth, the hardness of her eyes. No: she was never his friend, then. It’s the inescapable conclusion. 

He’d tried. He really had. Because she was there. What else was he supposed to do? He came back from the seeming dead, and yet John was still determined to marry her. _What life?_ he’d jested to Mycroft, meaning it more than he should. _I’ve been away._ But John _had_ moved on, and didn’t consider for one moment coming back to their old life. That was very clear: that door was closed. Sherlock had thought about it, time and again while he was away. Imagined it in his darkest moments: that somewhere, in some distant future, if he managed to survive this, he’d go back to London. To Baker Street and to John. To that life. He did it: survived and returned, only John was gone, claimed by someone else. 

It didn’t mean it was the end, of course, Sherlock thinks, analysing a crack in the ceiling plaster. He exhales a thin stream of smoke and notices that his fingers are burning again. Stub, withdraw, light, inhale. Temporary respite. (Mrs Hudson will fume at him over the smoke getting into the curtains. Can’t be helped. Besides, she’ll understand.) 

It wasn’t the end. He’d still had pieces of John. His only choice was to accept Mary. John’s choice made that decision for him: if he wanted John, then he had to have Mary. So, for the first time in his life, he’d made a monumental effort and tried. She was there before him, snakelike in her speed, ready to accommodate, to be friends, though it was always a friendship that came with teeth. He ignored the teeth and accepted her. Tried to. He made them a vow. 

( _Mary’s body crashes into him with a gasp as the bullet penetrates her sternum._ ) 

He failed. 

He’s failed so many times now that it’s difficult to know where to even begin the back trace. He failed by refusing John that first dinner. He hadn’t known then, that he actually might have wanted that. Just refused him outright. He was kinder than he’d ever been with anyone else who’d tried that. He’d never even considered accepting, allowing John’s light verbal probe to open a real possibility between them. He’d come to regret that within months, wondering what might have happened if he’d responded differently. Sherlock could see from John’s other relationships that he was nothing like the women John routinely chose, so it was never likely that anything would have come of it. And after he came back, it was too late. 

So he went with it: never tried to persuade John to choose differently. To choose him instead. John made himself into John&Mary, so he accepted John&Mary as a fixed reality and adjusted accordingly. Not much else to be done about it: John had made his choice. He made them a vow, and did everything in his power to keep it. He did what he could to fix John’s marriage for him, little as he knows about any of that. He’d argued on Mary’s behalf, wanting to keep John safe from her potential retaliation, and also to keep him happy. Mary was what he’d chosen; Sherlock therefore dutifully did what he could to make that work for him. He’d dealt with Mary’s blackmailer. Accepted his punishment without argument, exile and then certain death in Serbia. It didn’t matter that she’d never thanked him for it, nor apologised for shooting him. He’d done it all for John. Somewhere, in the vague notion of what love is supposed to be, Sherlock has the idea that love is meant to act this way: selflessly. Doing what needs to be done. He’d done everything he could for John, including urging him to go back to her once the wound left by Mary’s bullet had healed in his chest. _You love her,_ he’d said when John balked. _You’re expecting a child together._ And John had scowled and responded acerbically, but he’d gone back in the end. Eventually. It was what he wanted. Sherlock knew it. He didn’t want to win John that way, as a default option to his assassin wife. If John hadn’t chosen him first, above anyone else, then it wasn’t a real choice. No: it was better that he’d gone back to Mary. 

Somehow, though, it was harder to accept the second time, after coming off the plane. He supposes he must have given up then. Somewhere between his surge of hope on the plane and coming down from the high after landing, the hope faded. Reality was John&Mary again, bullets aside. And now the baby, too. And meanwhile, there was a case. The game was on again, so he’d buried himself in that instead. 

He should have sensed John’s unhappiness, but he didn’t see it until it was much too late. 

Perhaps his greatest mistake was not seeing through Mary. Sherlock contemplates this sourly. He’d seen it from the start: liar. Mary was patently untrustworthy, yet he’d deliberately skimmed over that, hadn’t he? He’d chosen not to see it until later, when it became inescapable. Perhaps this was his one selfish act: deliberately looking the other way. He tells himself that he wanted to believe that John had chosen well. That if John had truly moved on, away from him, then the woman he had chosen was right for him this time. He knows that the reality was that he hadn’t wanted to rock the boat. John had only just begun speaking to him again; Sherlock hadn’t wanted to infuriate him all over again with this unwelcome deduction about his fiancée. Perhaps it was always going to come out, anyway. Lies always do, in the end. Mary lied about everything. Absolutely everything. By the time he’d confronted her in the abandoned church in the rain, he’d been grimly aware of it, and she’d retaliated, drugging him and running off, leaving John quite literally holding the baby and him unable to see his vow through. 

He should have been aware of what she was doing. He’d thought that once the dust had settled after the Magnussen business, Mary would settle into her new life as Mary Watson, the life she claimed she wanted so badly. However, the truth is that Mary never stopped working, manipulating, rearranging things to her own liking. She’d subtly pushed John into that life, the life of Mary Watson, spouse and parent, and stolen into John’s place at Sherlock’s side instead. And he’d had stood by and let it happen, played his hand too fully as Mary’s friend. Let Mary push John out of his rightful place. Why hadn’t he seen it? Why didn’t he prevent it? (The answer comes swiftly: because he was too busy occupying himself with cases, too busy being clever.) The truth is that he was afraid: afraid of Moriarty, whatever he’d left in store. He hadn’t let John in on that. He should have, Sherlock realises now. He should have told John, should have just said, _I’m afraid. You’ve always protected me before: can I rely on you to be there by my side now? I need you._ He’d said the opposite, though. That it was Mary’s skills he needed (her words in his mouth, he sees now, belatedly), Mary whose contributions he valued. He hadn’t registered the anger in John’s tone, how deeply cut he was by Sherlock’s rejection. 

They’d had cases. They’d had seven months of work, and Sherlock had been peripherally aware that the gap between them was ever widening. He hadn’t known how to close it. Meanwhile, Mary was always there, ready to chatter confidingly, phoning and texting, and generally filling the void left by John’s silence. Not that John had been entirely silent; he’d been there when he could, but it wasn’t the same as it once was. Either Mary was there, too, or else John was terse, biting out quips with more than his usual pith, heaving sighs when a text from Mary would call him home. He should have taken the time to tell John what any of that has meant to him over the years, just in case John wanted to hear it. He’d tried saying it directly. _I like you._ Framed as a light-hearted quip, to be sure, but he’d meant it. John had only frowned, though. 

In the right pocket of his dressing gown, John’s note lies folded into a square. Sherlock has read it forty-eight times now, far more than his six viewings of Mary’s video. It’s committed to memory and he doesn’t want to read it again. John was angry and lost and broken when he wrote it, and no doubt some of his words can be attributed to that. Some of the others, though… perhaps they can’t. 

Perhaps he is entirely correct in asserting that Sherlock doesn’t have the first idea of what it means to be there for someone else. Of how to be a friend. Of how to put other people before himself. Sherlock balks at this last; he feels quite certain that he has done little else than put John before himself in every large situation that’s arisen since his return. But he’s failed in all of the small things. The everyday. He let Mary work her manipulations, stealing John’s place, seemingly replacing him. Making jokes at his expense. Sherlock is aware, dimly, that he is not very good at judging when John will laugh and when John will want to punch him. He let Mary make those calls, and perhaps the resulting effect was that John wanted to punch them both. Upon reflection, Sherlock realises that the latter was definitely the case. Why didn’t he see what she was doing? It’s as though she compounded everything that Sherlock was doing wrong, magnified it by the very act of joining in on it. Making John feel even less as though his opinion or feelings counted. 

As well, Sherlock let Mary in too close, let himself believe that she liked him and genuinely wanted to be his friend. He’d wanted to believe that. For John’s sake, he’d tried to warm to Mary and succeeded. He’d thought it was mutual. He understands all of it now: she did not like him at any point in their shared history. That bullet was intended to kill. All of those verbal barbs were intended to hurt. And perhaps she hated John just as much, wanting to destroy them both. (Why? Is this Moriarty, still? Was this the plan, then? To burn the heart out of him?) The wedge that now exists between him and John was carefully crafted and slipped into place, finalised and sealed with her death. 

In retrospect, it’s surprising that John stuck around at all, for either of them. He’s no expert, but the bite in John’s tone when speaking to Mary should have alerted him to danger, there. He was coming to the end of his tether and both Sherlock and Mary ignored it. Mary _left_ him – and John had every right to be furious. Sherlock hadn’t been able to preserve their marriage to that extent. He’d dealt with John, convinced him to go back. He’d failed to deal with Mary, convince her to stay. Perhaps he’d been wrong to push John into back to her. Perhaps she wasn’t the one for him. He’d thought it was what John wanted, though, and tried so hard to give him that. If John didn’t want him, then surely Sherlock could at least arrange for him to have what he really wanted. 

He hasn’t thought about what he himself wants in a very long time. Not since before this. Not since before Mary’s death, and John’s letter. Not since he got off the plane, if it comes to that. 

Sherlock stubs out the cigarette. The sitting room is grey-blue with smoke. Sherlock gets up and goes to the window, pushing it open. Cold autumn air comes filtering in and he shivers, pulling his dressing gown more closely around himself. Normally he loves autumn but now all he can feel is the death of summer, the cold fingers of winter prying anything good apart and withering it. He used to stand here, waiting for John to come home from somewhere, trying to curtail his imagination. But sometimes, every so often, when the night was especially beautiful, he’d let himself go…

_He’d be standing here, at the window, and John would come home. Seventeen footfalls on the staircase and then he’d be there, in the doorway. ‘Were you watching for me?’ he’d ask, and Sherlock would nod. Pleased, John would come over, take Sherlock into his arms. ‘I’m home now,’ he’d say, his voice dropping and coming over velvet-smooth, the way Sherlock especially likes. He’d pull Sherlock’s face down to his own and kiss him, his mouth soft, hands firm and gentle at once, pressed into Sherlock’s back. ‘I shouldn’t have gone without you,’ John says. ‘Everything is more fun when you’re there.’ Sherlock makes a questioning sound. ‘Everything?’ ‘Everything,’ John confirms, kissing him again. ‘But I’m home now, so…’ his voice trails off, dark with suggestion, and Sherlock lets a smile cross his face even as desire snakes down the tendrils of his nervous system and quivers there, his heartbeat faster –_

No, stop. It’s moronic to even think about it, because now there are no possibilities, not anymore. There are only brick walls: Sherlock is in exile. 

He has simultaneously given John everything he had to give – his life, his freedom, more than once, relinquished any claim he had on him in favour of letting Mary have him, relinquished any secret hopes he might have harboured, regardless of how vague or futile – yet he has also failed John in every way possible. He shut John out, afraid to let silences fall between them lest that which could never be discussed somehow rose up between them, lest his very silence betray him. Lest he accidentally let slip what it was that he’s really wanted all these years. He tried to stop wanting and couldn’t. He tried to give John what he wanted instead, and couldn’t. He failed to convince Mary to be what John needed. He failed to stop her from holding John down, reducing him to a shadow of himself. He failed to keep Mary from taking his bullet. He deserved to be shot at that time. He just couldn’t stop showing off, couldn’t stop seeking validation in his own cleverness since that was all that was left to him once he’d let Mary take John in every way possible. 

If he could go back to that moment in the aquarium and take the bullet, he would do it. If that was what would have truly made John happy, he would have done it. He has nothing else to offer John but this, a pointless wish that he could have given his life once again to give John the life he wanted. Sherlock struggles with this. Was that a life that would have truly made John happy? He doesn’t believe it any more, but would John have been any happier with him? Sherlock feels tremendously dubious, the canyon of his self-loathing echoing deeply within himself. 

Regardless, he cannot turn back time. He cannot undo his exile. He cannot escape this freefall. 

John will never forgive him. 

Never. 

Sherlock closes the window abruptly and, chilled from head to toe, goes to his bedroom and crawls into bed. He does not know or care what time it is. The cigarette lighter in his pocket digs into his hipbone. He does not care. 

Did Mary ever truly love John? He’d thought so, but his earlier reflections suggest that perhaps this was never the case. If this is Moriarty, then perhaps everything she did was calculated to hurt John just as badly as himself, to destroy their friendship. The way John has lashed out is suggestive of his own, underlying guilt. Did Mary provoke that guilt? Perhaps, perhaps not. Sherlock cannot be certain. He does not know what did or did not occur behind the closed doors of their marriage, has forbidden himself to dwell on it.

Was he wrong to have urged John to go back to her, then? Was this another failure? Sherlock examines this again. He’d thought that they were a good fit. She was dangerous: John likes danger. She was female: John likes women. She was willing and happy to have a child with John… Sherlock stops here. Did John ever actually want that? He’d thought so. He’d thought that was a happy response, at the wedding. (What does he know of reading people’s reactions when not applied specifically to criminal intent?) She was like Sherlock: Sherlock had thought this was also a draw. John liked him, at least as a friend. Could the parallel not be made here? Was what he wanted in a friend not the same as what he wanted in a partner? (He could have asked. He should have asked. Another failure, here.) Or worse, was Mary’s very similarity to him the reason behind the poison in John’s tone after they married? Was it precisely because she was too much like Sherlock that John rejected it? Sherlock does not know that John did reject it; this is nothing more than a gut feeling and gut instinct is unreliable. Somehow, though, he feels certain that part of John’s reaction (overreaction? Surely not, considering the circumstances) to Mary’s death stems from some failure on John’s part, some unacknowledged guilt. (Does it matter now?)

(Nothing matters.)

 _You have failed me in every way that one person can fail another,_ John wrote, and Sherlock closes his eyes, thinking about this yet again. The accusation stabs into him like knives, and he accepts it in full. He has started and scratched out dozens of responses to John to leave with Molly in his head, but they’re all futile: he cannot escape the truth of this statement.

_Dear John, I know that I have failed you in every way possible, but if you would give me yet one more chance, I would like to try to do better._

No.

_Dear John, I don’t know how to be the sort of person you would need me to be for you. All I know is that I am not that and I don’t know how to remedy that._

No. 

_Dear John, I know that I am utterly inadequate in every way, yet I nevertheless yearn to do anything I possibly can for you. I would give you anything, do anything, be anything; just tell me what it is that you need._

No. 

_Dear John, please let me take it all back. I’m sorry for all of it. I don’t deserve you. I love –_

Decidedly not. 

In a way, he does know what John needs: he needs to feel that he matters, to be needed, to have a purpose. Sherlock robbed of him that, aided and abetted by John’s own wife. Was that his own, petty revenge for John having chosen Mary over him? Has he used Mary as a weapon over John having chosen her over him? 

He wishes that John had asked again sometime, asked the question he first asked back at Angelo’s that first time. Their first dinner. _You’ve got a boyfriend, then?_ He never did, though. Perhaps he’d changed his mind. 

_No, I’ve never bothered with relationships of that nature before, but I’m somewhat intrigued,_ he might have said. _No, I’m single. What are you asking?_ The direct approach. _Not yet,_ he could have tried. The flirtatious approach. Or he could have responded in the negative, then waited to see what John might have done with it. Would he have pursued it? Sherlock has imagined this scenario literally hundreds of times over. Would John have slid a hand onto his knee under the table? Taken his hand on the way home? Nodded suggestively down the corridor to Sherlock’s bedroom? Invited him up to his own under the guise of needing bedding, a pillow, then somehow made a move from there? Given John’s rather bold dating style, Sherlock does wonder how forward he might have been that night. Or maybe he’d really just been asking for information’s sake. Sherlock does not know. 

What he does know is that he’s lost John irrevocably. He tried to give him everything and instead took from him the only thing John cared about losing: Mary. Scientifically Sherlock understands that her death was not entirely his fault, but it certainly feels that way, and – more to the point – that’s how John sees it. 

He has lost John. Lost his touchstone. His grounding. His anchor. His conductor of light. Without him, Sherlock feels the bedroom around him spiralling outward, adrift in space. He has lost/he is lost. John has exiled him and Sherlock deserves to be exiled. There is nothing that can be done. 

_Sorry, John. So sorry. I’ve failed you yet again._

He loves John and has lost him forever. 

Sherlock closes his eyes and lets himself freefall. 

*


End file.
